I just got some first hand experience with PLIP, rhost and tomsrtbt during
the last few days. My boss purchased a used laptop to use specifically for
his astronomy hobby. He really only wants to run one program on the laptop,
but the problem is the program uses a CD-ROM for it's rather large (500
megs) data files. The old laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM, but does have
enough room on the hard drive to store all the data files. The problem was
how to move 500 megs of data onto a laptop with no "real" network support,
as I don't have any PCMIA stuff. The solution: tomsrtbt and my trusty PLIP
cable!
This is were the story gets funny. Getting the PLIP network up with my
regular Linux box wasn't a problem at all, as I have plenty of experience
with PLIP from my Iopener. But getting rhost working, what a bugger! I
think most of my problems at this point were my failure to have a .rhosts
file on the "receiving" computer for awhile or perhaps because I was using a
"mixed" Linux environment: tomsrtbt on the laptop and my normal setup on my
Linux box. Anyway, I took the laptop to work and used tomsrtbt on both the
laptop and my work computer and STILL couldn't the files transfered. My rep
as a computer nerd was in peril! :)
Back home again, I decided to start anew. A booted both the laptop and my
Linux box into tomsrtbt, and even used the laptop as a serial console for my
Linux box (it's headless). Got PLIP working, did the rhost thing and tried
the file transfer. Worked perfectly the first time! Arrgh, why wouldn't
this work last night? or at work? Right now, the laptop is happily
receiving it's 500 megs of data files.
So the point is... uh, I feel your pain. PLIP can be annoying... I know
I've had trouble with PLIP outside of tomsrtbt; sometimes with a failure you
have to unload the kernel module(s). This weekend, l intend to figure out
why rhosts wasn't working correctly for me earlier. I guess the point is:
keep pluggin away. Anyway, Tom's post is really good, especially the part
about the .rhost file, but a few things:
> One of the problems is that there are often several ways to do the same
> thing, rsh & rshd OR nc, tar OR cpio, etc., The way I do it is roughly:
>
> # on 192.168.1.9
> insmod plip
> ifconfig plip0 192.168.1.9 pointopoint 192.168.1.10 up
> route add 192.168.1.10 plip0
On 2.0.x kernels, like what tomsrtbt uses, for some odd reason the first
plip device is plip1, so you have to use that for the device name. In
2.2.x kernels, they changed it to plip0 like all the other devices. I also
believe I used a slightly different route command, although they both should
work alike:
insmod plip
ifconfig plip1 192.168.1.9 pointopoint 192.168.1.10 up
route add -net 192.168.1.0 dev plip1
Now, the laptop is rocking with a file transfer of a little over a 100 megs
/ hour. Woo-hoo!
Douglas Bollinger
Mt. Holly Springs, PA
My other computer runs Linux.
